I think that yes, I am saying that, at some level. I don’t want to draw that conclusion. I resist it. But I can’t shake the pessimism I have over the big picture. The Katrina debacle was so unnerving to me because it showed how fragile civil society was. I wonder what would happen if, God forbid, terrorists set off a suitcase nuke in an American port city? Stephen Flynn, the port security guru, told me that if that were to happen, the US Government would have no choice but to shut down all US ports until they could install radiation detection devices. To stop all port activity for two weeks or longer would probably destroy the US economy – and with it the world’s. It could happen that quickly. Frank Gaffney came to the Dallas Morning News last year to tell us about a little-noticed 2004 blue-ribbon panel report on the danger facing America from an electromagnetic impulse (EMP) weapon. A conventional nuclear bomb atop a Scud and detonated high in the atmosphere above the US could, says Gaffney, “take the United States from a 21st-century society to an 18th-century society instantaneously.”

These are not Chicken Little scenarios. Either case would put this country in tremendous hardship, and would severely test the bonds of civil society. If such hard times were to come upon us, those who knew how to do for themselves, and who had neighbors and family close by that they could rely on, would stand a much better chance of making it. Those who have just been going through life taking it easy and assuming that it’s always going to be like it is – they’re going to be in trouble. I think I’m far too much like the latter than the former, and I want to change that while there’s time. I think that we always have to be working towards bettering the common conditions for us all, but I find it increasingly difficult to have much hope in the power of collective effort under today’s conditions. But regular readers know I tend to Derbish levels of gloom sometimes. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise.